’ER’ Actress Maria Bello Comes Out

Maria Bello, who has appeared in several films and TV shows like "ER," came out in a New York Times piece called "Coming Out as a Modern Family."

In the essay, the actress recounts how she first told her 12-year-old son Jackson that she is in a same-sex relationship. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Bellow told her son about a year after she began a relationship with her best friend Clare Munn.

"We had an immediate connection but didn’t think of it as romantic or sexual," she wrote in the New York Times. "She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically."

The actress said she was worried how her son would react to her relationship with Munn, but Bello writes Jackson approved. "Mom, love is love, whatever you are," he told her.

"So I would like to consider myself a ’whatever,’ as Jackson said," she wrote. "Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, ’love is love.’ And I love our modern family. Maybe, in the end, a modern family is just a more honest family."

According to US Weekly, Bello was in a relationship with another woman and a few men, including TV exec Dan McDermott, who is the father of her son.